A bus mechanics’
holiday across the Continent to Athens in a specially-fitted Piccadilly
double-decker with a singing trio and an absconded American starlet fleeing a
lifetime of movie success, pursued by the mother and agent she supports.

Yates for
Woodfall on a play, a play mind you, done up for the screen by its author.

A masterpiece
calculated to inspire awe, as the director whips his technical facility round
London as easy as you please, really making light of all difficulties, teaching
the guess-your-weight machines to sing and so on, a gag for Barrymore and Hawks
(Twentieth Century), sprucing up Old
Bailey robes, wig too, “BUILD IT YOURSELF ‘FAMOUS INSTITUTIONS’ Series OLD
BAILEY №7”.

Schlesinger’s Billy Liar is just the year before. Which is to say the supreme poetry of N.F. Simpson’s tract on
supreme poetry has its match in a director of genius who is supremely fitted
for it, “apes are bending all the time, Sylvia, as well you know.” Nabokov’s assistant producer sets the
scene for the sessions of sweet silent thought, a somewhat laborious operation
in the vein of Laurel and Hardy, who might suggest the title.

Howard Thompson
of the New York Times, “it’s awful.” Variety, “Peter Yates directs with a
technique that treats comedy as deadly serious and is responsible for much of
the antic spirit”. Mark Deming (Rovi), “farcical
British comedy”.

Buñuel
and Ionesco, Thornton Wilder at a stretch. Ode to Lizzie Borden,

You can’t chop your mama up in
Massachusetts,

Not even if you’re tired of her
cuisine;

No, you can’t chop your mama up in
Massachusetts,

If you do you know there’s bound to
be a scene.

The witness
deposes that he was but has not ever been a masochist.

Halliwell’s Film Guide, “nonsense”.

The
judge speaks from the bench, “the Law would be moribund if it were unable to
deal with a case such as this.” There is of course The Bed Sitting Room of Milligan and Antrobus (dir. Richard Lester,
adaptation Charles Wood). “What weight ye shall give to it is a matter entirely
for you.”

Britmovie, “a madcap study of illogicality in the suburban
bubble...”

Robbery

The structure is
easily dependent on a mere two films, Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob and Watt & Wright’s Night Mail. An asymmetrical construction puts the two in such a way
that the short film represents the body of the work, and the Ealing masterpiece
the short opening sequence.

A key element is
the hideout beneath a disused airfield from the war. The final indignity is a
junk pile where a number of the robbers are captured.

At no time, it
would seem, have any reviewers been aware of any significance attaching to this
film, so it must be classed as esoteric, in the scheme of things.

Bullitt

After the Chicago
prologue (Friday) the film is divided in two parts, a red herring under the
sign of Chalmers (Saturday) and the genuine investigation, “time starts now”
(Sunday).

The momentum
derives from Robbery, the style is a unique amalgam of Roy Ward Baker’s The
One That Got Away and Jack Webb’s Dragnet for absolute realism by
elimination of superfluities (this is why some critics have decried a lack of
“character motivation” and whatnot they simply don’t see).

The false trail
is a mobster’s ruse, a true bill is presented.

One of the great achievements
in the cinema.

A fine echo of
Lang’s mediator accounts for the form, in a way. That makes the film at least
as humorous as it is abstruse.

Murphy’s War

A long and
monstrous allegory on sinking to your enemy’s level.

It will not
surprise you, who read the papers, that critics could not fathom it somehow.

Variety noticed the nobility of the enterprise. “It was
shot mainly in a remote uncomfortable part of Venezuela’s Orinoco River and
director Peter Yates has brought out every ounce of the discomfort of the
location.”

The Hot Rock

A jewel heist in
four parts.

1. The Gotham
disaster diversion (museum).

2. “Picking your
feet in Poughkeepsie” (state prison).

3. Revolution
(precinct house).

4. Afghanistan
Bananastan (downtown bank).

That is the significance
of the film, no-one was able to deduce it, anyway in the critical fraternity
no-one did. On the contrary, Variety called it episodic and Ebert
repetitious, but there you are.

A very sumptuous
widescreen comedy, virtuosically filmed.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

A tautly
structured film negligently reviewed.

The three bank
managers (one unseen) are Coyle with his back to the wall. A twinge gets a bank
officer killed, that’s him too.

He’s up on an
old-fashioned bootlegging rap, the gunrunner he deals with is a hotshot with
radical clients.

Down the middle
is a regular string of bank robberies, more or less professional.

Coyle goes down
in the rat trade, on a separate set of books.

The terrain of
Yates’ Robbery but laid in
Massachusetts, handled to the last degree of expressivity.

For Pete’s Sake

You can see how
decidedly advantageous the script is when Henrietta and a policeman ride a bull
through the streets of New York as her husband Pete gets the news of his
killing in the commodities market, it isn’t the classical bull on Wall Street
but a Brahma bull in Brooklyn.

The whole shebang
pictures a two-tier economy of the moneyed and the strapped. Without capital
the lower tier fails into a shadow economy of loan sharking, prostitution,
mobsterism and theft. All of this is one aspect of the comedy, or one way of
looking at it. Since the pork bellies futures depend on a deal to sell the
commodity to the Soviets, there is a forecast of the Russian experience.

There is a straightforward
line of nightmare in it as well. Pete’s well-to-do brother is president of a
local TV dealers association, Pete calls him a TV repairman, and he is seen
repairing their TV set before dinner. Henrietta’s first client for Mrs. Cherry
is a stockbroker whose “little-boy game” is to pretend he’s a TV repairman (her
second and last, a judge, apparently dies in her apartment).

The simplest and
best line from a certain point of view ends in Pete’s encomium for the true
wife through thick and thin, above and beyond the call of duty. In these heroic
escapades, a housewife borrows and then pays back, with escalating interest,
the margin payment on the pork bellies. The blank of consumerism on the fringes
becomes a vortex in employment.

Yates’ two major casting
coups are Molly Picon as Mrs. Cherry and Heywood Hale Broun as the judge. His
comic basis is the bare layout of Hitchcock’s Family Plot, he adds a
parody of Friedkin’s The French Connection and another of Boorman’s Deliverance
(with Bill McKinney). Critics have sized this film up rather badly, according
to their lights. Henrietta’s running conversation with a cousin here or there,
conducted on pay phones, looks like a concurrent parody of Cassavetes’ A
Woman Under the Influence.

And then, the
image of the bull comes at the end of many perhaps explaining the stock market
economy of recent times, the so-called “new economy”, seen as a speculative
aberration. Or else, how Mr. & Mrs. Robbins got into the market, with a
housewife’s view of business passing by degrees through Albee’s Everything
in the Garden.

The point being,
if nothing else, not to miss the superb comic performances, principally
Streisand’s. “Revives memories,” said the reviewer in Sight and Sound,
“of how much more inventively they used to do it thirty years ago.” The Mad
Miss Manton (dir. Leigh Jason) was just as overlooked.

Mother, Jugs & Speed

“The cripple, the
junkie, the wounded and the dying, society calls them all worthless, but they’re
not worthless—not to us—to us each one is worth forty-two fifty, plus fifty
cents a mile, and let’s not forget it! When it comes to realizing that people
in distress will jump into the first rig that shows up, well then, that’s when
the drive and the enthusiasm of you men
will make the difference. But there’s another group out there, men, and I will
not dignify the Unity Ambulance Company by mentioning its name, but they want
our territory! Our sick, your jobs! But we’re not gonna let them do it to us, are we, men. You bet we’re not, no sir! ”

A
two-party system, ambulance service in L.A.

With Allen
Garfield from Ritchie’s The Candidate, and
Yates of Bullitt directing those high-speed
moves, one of Harold Lloyd’s and Frank Tashlin’s disciples. “Somebody greased
him! Why didn’t you get in there and make an offer?”

An image of
romance under the drug trade and the hurly-burly, wrapped into a vacationing
couple’s Bermuda adventures.

The moray eel is
from Lang’s Die Nibelungen, the voodoo from Hamilton’s Live and Let
Die.

Breaking Away

As Janet Maslin
points out in her New York Times
review, speaking for the critical profession, Yates had made several films that
in no way could she understand, and they were not successful with the public,
either. Therefore it’s easier to understand and appreciate the hokeshit cornball
elements of this film as rubbing the crystal balls and bottom-lines of Ebert
and Maslin et al. without disturbing
the lines of beautiful thought, which are centered on The Star-Spangled Banner
and foreign entanglements and Tory presumption.

...what curbs or schools

Or monuments were squared by such rude rules,

Quarried and carried away and dressed in line...

Howard Nemerov, “The Quarry”

Eyewitness

Extravagance is
the very keynote of the screenplay, you can’t buy Thanksgiving and Christmas
with murder and loan-shark money, the two far poles are Soviet Jews gotten out
by bribing Soviet officials and (the later instrument of this procedure) a
Vietnamese entrepreneur dealing with all sides in the war.

Contrary to this
is the love affair of a skyscraper janitor and a TV news reporter (first seen
filling in for the drama critic with a merry pan of a Broadway musical on Robin
Hood called Robin).

Intense labors go
into all of it, the girl is rich and Jewish, the boy is “a real pro” and “an
ex-Marine” who likes his work. The Vietnamese has an office in the building and
is murdered, every one who served in Vietnam knew him by reputation and rumor.

And there is
more, but it all serves to extrapolate the theme from the analysis of various
angles and fragments almost abstractly, so that even a critic like Canby who
enjoyed a certain atmosphere about it never bothered to fuse the elements in
his New York Times review and thought half the film not worthy of his
attention.

Krull

The film, an
English satire upon Star Wars, emphasizing the tawdriness of its aspect,
may be observed after the credits to briefly pay homage to Olivier’s Henry V
and also advance a theme out of Howard’s Fire Over England. The
centerpiece is a conviction that one is avenged upon a beautiful lady in the
passing of time, and that this is no consolation, particularly by dint of the
prophecies here concerning the Hobbit films and Potter films. The finale is a
remembrance of Baker’s Quatermass and the Pit.

The Dresser

The artist in the
toils and throes and what have you.

He is attended
by, what would you call it, his apparatus.

This constitutes
the drama, not Hitler and his hordes, nor the life of the theater.

Failure to observe
this delimits the understanding of several critics, especially American, who
are addressed in the film.

Olivier answers
the famous crack about him (cited by Canby) in Bolt’s Lady Caroline Lamb.

The minute
particulars of art, put together with exceeding care and polished like Sir’s
makeup so the joints don’t show.

Eleni

A New York
Times reporter investigates the death of his mother at the hands of Greek
Communists after World War II.

It’s as simple as
that, and what a world of confusion is in the reviews.

Many objected to
the portrayal of the murderer as “biased”, as if that were possible. Ebert
objected to the flashback, and so on (Dmytryk’s Cornered as journalism).

Many stylistic
points are slandered by the various critics, and it all amounts to one more
tribulation of a Greek village formerly occupied by Nazis and Russians and
Turks, “now we invade ourselves”, says a wise man.

Suspect

A thing made of
images, a Supreme Court Justice hands a file to his secretary and kills
himself, she is found dead, a homeless man has her purse, another slashes an
investigator.

A Department of
Justice file key with a crucifix, a trial transcript “returned to central
storage”, a judge with a bleeding arm.

The accused is a
Vietnam veteran and cannot speak. A lobbyist sleeps with a congresswoman, he’s
on the jury and has an affair with the defense attorney as they solve the case
together.

The last in
particular left the critics open-mouthed, the sense of humor in Yates’ films is
something they just don’t seem to appreciate. Yet there she is, the defense
attorney representing her client, pursued at night into the empty cells below
the D.C. courtroom, an arm throttles her and she cuts it. You can see these
people at the Globe Theatre, “c’mon Shakespeare, it’s a wooden O for crying out
loud!”

The House On Carroll Street

A film with a
very simple structure that eluded every critic.

The American flag
over gravestones is the opening image.

Nazi murderers
are shipped in under Senatorial auspices, each supplied with the name of a dead
Jew.

The FBI agent who
cracks the case in New York is sent to Butte, Montana.

And so, with the
final joke, a very laborious masterpiece set in 1951 bites the dust, critically
speaking.

An Innocent Man

Variety claimed this was “nightmarishly structured”, but
it’s very solid.

A chief mechanic
for American Airlines spots a problem and holds the plane against management
objections, the innards show the glitch to him if not the man who’s worked on
it for four hours.

His wife sails
through an evolution exam with his coaching and serves him steak, otherwise
it’s salad in the refrigerator.

Everything is
laid out for the colossal screw-up he has to face. A coke-addled cop and his
partner, who keep competitors away from a mobster, blunder into the chief
mechanic’s home and shoot him, then they frame him to cover up. He won’t cop a
plea on an honor farm but gets six years in the penitentiary. Internal Affairs
has no proof.

The prison
population is black and white, you either kill a man or you’re a thrill. The
chief mechanic learns the ropes and is paroled, a murderer and thoroughgoing
ex-convict.

The cops hound
him, he kennels them in a scheme that mirrors the film’s three parts. The cops
are given a wrong address and seize cocaine belonging to their boss, it’s taken
out of their hands, then sold back to them in front of a witness from Internal
Affairs.

Simple as that,
with much subsidiary material. He gets his job back and keeps ‘em flying.

Year of the Comet

Mark Twain would
have loved this film, because he loved a good joke and especially one that
nobody gets. Nobody got the joke of Year of the Comet, even though
Penelope Ann Miller is made up and costumed to give a convincing impression of
Margaret Thatcher, and is even called Maggie. Twain wrote a whole book about a
man who made a witticism that no-one in his little town understood, and who was
thenceforth called Pudd’nhead because of it.

It’s
much the same with Keeping Up Appearances, the show is an obsessive little
joke about snobbism, until you recognize The Iron Lady in Hyacinth Bucket with
her redeemingly pathetic side, among the daughters of Lear. Who can forget her
touching deprecation of Paramount Leader Deng’s fierceness over the Crown
Colony of Hong Kong? Now, one has not the slightest wish to offend the powers
that be, particularly because one knows just how powerful they be. Once, this
writer incidentally remarked that Hank Kingsley got that outside job as Dr.
Phil, and that very week The Larry Sanders Show was taken off the air in
Los Angeles syndication. The satire in Year of the Comet is completely
satisfying, but is sufficiently well-rounded to temper the sting with an
alternative viewpoint. Maggie and her American partner (Tim Daly, looking not
like Reagan but his chum Errol Flynn) have a lot of derring-do adventures
against an evil madman (Louis Jourdan) and triumph in the end.

Interpretations
don’t matter, as long as the material is received. And now, one is in the
unenviable position of having to explain the joke. Maggie’s a buyer in the wine
firm run by her father (Ian Richardson). She travels to Scotland to inspect a
cellar owned by Jourdan, who is busy torturing a man for the secret formula
that restores youth. In the cellar, Maggie finds a very large bottle of
Bordeaux, vintage 1811 (the year of the comet), and with Napoleon’s initial
molded in the glass. So the joke is on “Morning in America” and the vision of
England as somehow restored, but as these things are nothing more than
political gambits anyway, it’s a harmless joke, and of course you may look at
it all quite differently.

Maggie and the
American, Oliver Plexico (that’s his name), inspect the bottle and find the
body of the tortured man lying nearby. She purchases the wine in a nervous
exchange, but Jourdan notices at the last moment that the formula has been
written (with a dying hand) on the wooden box that holds the bottle. So there
is a pursuit, and a very amusing struggle in the mists on Loch Ness (echoed
later in Incident at Loch Ness, another witticism missed). The joke is
intensified when the formula on the box is found to be a feint, the real one is
written on a piece of paper stuck behind the label on the bottle.

Jourdan holds all
the cards, captures the two, completes the genetic or molecular preparation,
and injects it into his own arm (this is sometimes referred to incorrectly by
reviewers as a “drug”). He’s holding a pistol on Maggie and Oliver, and as he
giddily starts singing “I’ve Got a Lot of Living to Do”, she dances sensually
before him to hold his smiling attention, after which he drops unconscious and
is disarmed. So much for the rejuvenation.

Returns to glory
are a feature of the past, as Eugene McCarthy has observed. This is a general
satire of the breed, if you will, and the fortuitous resemblance to The 39
Steps has been very misleading to critics everywhere.

The Bordeaux is
put up for auction. Plexico outbids a forceful rival, and the wine is tasted,
before he and Maggie embrace to the quiet applause of the bidders.

This is very
intensely amusing, if you get the joke. Yates and Goldman guarded against
misunderstandings by setting the film in locations (Scotland and France) that
make it worthwhile just being there, and Yates still further accentuates the
material by playing up Art Malik’s resemblance to Marlon Brando in this part
(one of the rival bidder’s crew) to suggest a mummery.

In spite of the
critical rejection of this film, nothing shows a lack of carelessness so much
as Hummie Mann’s Scottish score, replacing one originally written by John
Barry, no less. A line in Pabst’s Don Quixote might have served as the
initial inspiration.

Mrs. Thatcher
(sometimes referred to as The PMS) is sensitive to criticism, as who is not,
but it’s entirely absurd to chuck a film out altogether just to please the
Tories because they are not amused. All the more so, let one say it again,
given the heroism and diligence of the principals, who save the day and have a
lark, so please you.

Curtain Call

The
fourth-generation scion of a book-publishing family sees the firm bought out
and its Spring List filled with trendy rubbish. At the same time, he moves into
new lodgings with his debutante mistress, and finds the place haunted by its
former residents, a Broadway acting duo married since the Nineteen-Twenties and
quarreling down the decades ever since.

Perturbed by his
apparent hallucinations, his mistress leaves him for a United States Senator.
The new owners of the company are a bottom-line feeding-frenzy with no other
interest in letters than a dead dormouse has. His position is untenable.

He discovers the
secret of his unpleasant ghosts, and deduces that the life of an institution is
the life of its love for what it does. He quits the company to go out on his
own, proposes to his mistress, the bickering Broadway stars vanish reconciled,
and his first book is a recollection of their happy life.

This is a close
reading of Meet John Doe from an analytical angle. Capra films the
Gospel as a modern comedy, more or less, and Yates has his Topper ghosts
as a kind of Old Testament. The great reconciliation is achieved in the manner
of Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life.

It’s also closely
tied to a key theme of Godard’s Éloge de l’Amour. And there is another
basis, the Chayefsky-Lumet version of Capra, Network.

Polly Walker’s
mannish Yuppie dating a Member of Congress comes from Stevens’ Woman of the
Year. James Spader laboriously imitates Jack Lemmon in all but timbre,
which is a decided calculation in favor of artificiality against the plain
dénouement. Michael Caine and Maggie Smith are the cross star lovers, and Buck
Henry erects his CEO on something like Ian Holm’s Himmler.